Oops, ATA missed that target again

“ATA takes aim at the driver shortage,” said the three-column Transport Topics headline after the American Trucking Associations’ annual convention Oct. 21-25 in Orlando, Fla.

The big-time-trucking association may be aiming, but at what? With 40,000 CDL licenses registered each month, clearly there is no driver shortage. So where are the bullets headed?

The real problem, of course, is the “decent” job shortage and the obvious short-term solution is better pay – truly a magic bullet if ever there was one. But that is not in the ATA’s ammo belt.

Instead, the ATA did what governments and corporations do when they have no idea what to do – they formed a committee. In this case, it’s a “workforce development” subcommittee to be headed by CRST International Chairman John Smith.

I don’t know John. He may be a nice guy. He certainly has been around for a while. In fact at the same ATA conference, he appeared on a panel called the “Legends of Trucking.” It appears the ATA has brought out the same industry leaders – old guns you might say – who have presided over the problem for decades. So don’t expect any more from this committee than maybe a bullet-point report resurrecting ideas that have already failed. One of those bullet points might be forming another committee.

Or maybe the industry could go along with suggestions from two members of President Trump’s cabinet, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Labor Secretary Alex Acosta – big guns for sure. Both spoke at the ATA event.

Chao stayed out of trouble. She talked mostly about recruiting more women, more veterans and more minorities – the same ideas that pop up every year at about this time.

Acosta, on the other hand, jumped in feet first. The labor secretary proposed an apprentice program. To be fair, it was in the context of both drivers and technicians (they must not be paying them enough either). Technician apprentices do seem to make sense.

OK, but driver apprentices? How would that work? Would they ride around with you? That’s the best way to learn, no doubt, but would the carriers pay them? Ha! Will the government pay them? Not this government, pal. Maybe they’d watch you from home through one of those driver-facing cameras and you could chat over Skype. Everybody would do it for free, of course.

Wish I had been there to watch the honchos in the audience elbow each other at the apprentice idea.

Meanwhile, a new element seems to be sneaking into explanations of the decent job shortage. Now they’re calling it a shortage of qualified drivers.

Early last month, for example, Werner Enterprises told the Journal of Commerce they had already received 100,000 driver applications for the year. “So it sounds like there is no shortage, but we hired less than 2.5 percent of them,” said Werner CEO Derek Leathers.

“There are drivers out there — people who have CDLs — but finding the professional driver is difficult,” he said.

So the “shortage” is of qualified drivers.

OK, Derek, but you did hire 2,500 qualified professional drivers?

So my question is, what happened to the 2,500 drivers they replaced? They had to be qualified too. Why are they gone? And you’ll soon be replacing the new 2,500, won’t you?

The so-called driver shortage doesn’t cause drivers to quit in huge numbers, and the ratio of applications to hires has nothing to do with it either, not even a little bit.

Carriers can blame drug-test failures, criminal records or whatever they come up with, but the real, hardcore problem boiled down to the bone remains that the job of professional truckload driver is hard, very hard, and we don’t earn enough, not nearly enough.

Good luck with the women, the veterans, the minorities and the apprentices who take the job of professional truck driver. The carriers will be replacing them soon, too.

John Bendel is Land Line freelancer and editor-at-large. A trucker for 10 years, he has been a trucking journalist for more than 14. His inimitable insight and matchless style of writing makes his series in Land Line – “Gizmos and Gears” – a runaway reader favorite.

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